Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [246]
‘Jesus, you bad as he is.’ Billy felt himself sweating. There was a contradiction of appalling proportions at the heart of Inchebe’s argument, but he could not see it clearly enough to be able to expose and refute it. He raised his heated face to an uncomprehending sky. ‘Give me strength,’ he said.
Sullivan was shaking his head slowly. ‘Aye, bejabbers, wasted effort,’ he said. ‘Where de point in dat?’
Suddenly Billy saw a way. ‘Tell me dis, den. How you know dey de right stones?’
‘What you mean?’
‘How you fin’ dem? You no born with stone, eh? Only stone you born with is you ball. Or mebbe you rainman bebby, you knock you ball tagedder make rain?’
Inchebe greeted this with dignified silence.
‘Well, den,’ Billy went on, ‘you got to look here, look dere, fin’ de good stone. Right or wrong?’
‘Right.’
‘Got you now.’ Billy paused, savouring his triumph. ‘One bleddy stone like anadder. How you know you stone de right one?’
Inchebe looked at him with genuine astonishment. ‘What kind question dat? Dey de wrong stone, rain no come down.’
FORTY-SEVEN
On his return, happening to pass Matthew Paris, Hughes mentioned the ship and the fact that she had anchored overnight. Most things came to Paris’s ears sooner or later. The people of the crew reported to him out of habit and a kind of deference that had survived the familiarity of the years; and both black and white confided in him sometimes when he was treating them for sickness or injury or discontent in the long, palm-thatch lean- to on the edge of the compound that he used for a sickroom.
He thought for a while about what Hughes had told him as he sat there at the corner of his hut on a low stool he had made out of driftwood, with his hat tilted forward against the low sun and his naked, long-shanked legs stretched out before him. He did not see anything very remarkable in a ship lingering a day or two longer than usual – there could be a score of reasons. That it was Hughes who had delivered the information was the only remarkable thing. In remote communities legends form as imperceptibly as clouds change shape and colouring; and Hughes, while still alive amongst them, had become a legendary climber and watcher. This lonely man had saved them once, or so it was generally held, in the violent early days of the settlement when the threads that held them all together had been stretched taut, close to snapping.
In the first rainy season it had happened, when the vast prairies of saw-grass lay under water. Hughes never spoke of it, taciturn in this as in all else; but the words with which he had come to tell the others had always been remembered – and repeated. Delblanc in particular had seen from the first the importance of telling things over; he had been clear-sighted in those times of danger, always seeking to encourage a sense of unity among the fugitives, ready to seize on anything that could be celebrated by the whole people together. Delblanc lay under the ground now, but this had been his legacy.
Jimmy, the linguister, had aided this work, especially with the children. He had found his vocation as a teacher, though his school was very irregularly attended and subject to changes in the weather. He taught the children to form letters and he taught them simple arithmetic; but his lessons were mainly story-telling and play-acting. He was helped sometimes by Paris, who had no idea of teaching, but would read extracts from his small stock of books. The children dozed or fidgeted to the sound of Pope and Hume.
The years had stiffened Jimmy’s back and thinned his wiry poll so that the scalp showed through. His habit of smiling was unchanged, but in class, for the sake of drama, he would compel his face to seriousness, and this was effective, even sometimes fearsome, because of the contrast. He always began the Hughes story in the same way, speaking in his high, musical, rather plaintive voice, raising his hands and assuming a fixed stare, so as to engage the children’s attention: ‘One time Oose climb dis big tree. Oose